A PARLIAMENTARY EXPERIMENT 361
sion of workers came to present a petition to the Czar in his
Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, headed by a priest employed
by the Government to lead the revolutionary movement into
safe channels. The Czar allowed himself to be persuaded
to order his Guards to fire on the assembled multitude in
order to discourage such demonstrations; and 1500 of them
were killed or wounded. This was a turning-point in the history
of the Russian revolution. It was impossible in future for
peasants and workers to believe that the Czar was their " little
father " who would surely redress their wrongs if only these
could be brought to his notice.
A year later a General Strike convinced Nicholas and his
advisers that they must counterbalance the extremists by
winning over the more moderate party by some concession to
constitutional government. So a DUMA or Parliament met in
May 1906. The " Cadets " were the largest party in it; but
the members had no experience of conducting parliamentary
business, and they wrangled so fiercely with each other and
with the ministers that the assembly was dissolved in less than
three months without having accomplished anything at all.
A second Duma came to an even more untimely end when the
members demurred to the Government's arrest of forty
opposition members on a charge of treason.
§ 177. ANOTHER ENTENTE.—The Russian Government might
have ended its constitutional experiment forthwith, but for
the fact that it was now negotiating with Britain for an under-
standing like that which had recently brought her into touch
with their French ally. By this time the British Government
had become seriously alarmed at the growing menace of the
German fleet. Hitherto they had felt confident that, build as he
would, it would take the Kaiser a long time to catch up to our
naval strength ; but in 1906 the launching of the Dreadnought
altered the whole situation. With the great range of her guns
and the high speed developed by her engines she made all
earlier battleships seem like old iron. The Germans could now
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